Pakistani president’s son escapes blast unharmed

The Pakistani president’s son has escaped unharmed a bomb attack that killed three people and wounded 15 others in the country’s southwestern province of Baluchistan.

“An explosive-laden motorbike parked at a roadside was blown up with a remote control device when [the] convoy of President Mamnoon Hussain’s son, Salman Mamnoon, was passing by late Sunday night in Hub Industrial Zone near the border with [the city of] Karachi,” local police official Ghulam Mustafa Shah told AFP on Monday.

Salman was unharmed because his vehicle had already passed the spot where the device detonated hitting a rickshaw and the last vehicle of the convoy, the official said.

“The rickshaw driver, a 12-year-old child in the rickshaw and a passerby died at the spot,” he added.

Most of the injured were reportedly pedestrians, though some police officers accompanying Salman were also wounded.

A spokesman for the rebel Baluch Liberation Army (BLA), Meerak Baluch, later claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to AFP.

“We claim responsibility for the attack, it was in response to the military operation carried out in various areas of [Pakistan’s] Baluchistan,” Baluch said.

Baluchistan is the biggest of Pakistan’s four provinces, but its roughly seven million residents have for decades campaigned for greater autonomy and control of the province’s gas resources and mineral wealth.